Cast-Iron Art Near the Sidewalk

During the day on Saturday, a flawless fall day, I had some time to walk around some of the Kohler Co. properties and parts of the town of Kohler, which is one pretty town. Near the sidewalk outside the Kohler Waters Spa -- which is adjacent to the design center -- I noticed a small cast-iron sculpture. A few steps further, I saw another. Then another.

I started paying attention to the signs describing the works. It turns out that they belong to the J.M. Kohler Arts Center and were created mostly in the 1990s or early 2000s as part of what the arts center called the Arts/Industry Program. If you follow the sidewalk from the spa and the design center, you'll continue to see the cast iron sculptures, most of them fairly small and mounted on concrete, or set inside a planting of some kind. The trail leads across a main street and to an otherwise unoccupied parcel near a small shopping center.

Many of the works were representational: a wolf head, a large baby head (enigmatically called "Waiting for Titus," by Michael Bishop), a motorcycle, and a canoe stripped of its skin and filled with stones. That was enigmatically called "Walt Whitman Cult Wagon," by Peter Flanary. A piece by Sadashi Inuzuka (of Michigan) was called "Exotic Species," and featured various blobs of cast iron, including one that looked like a doughnut, another like a sea sponge, and various others that were less identifiable and vaguely unsettling.

Then there was this, "Perfect World," cast iron set in concrete, by Richard Hanned of New York.

A close look at the hemispheres reveals that they are supposed to be two halves of the Earth, whatever else they look like at first glance. The ribbon describing an infinity sign around the hemispheres looks like a train track, and part of the track is occupied by a side view of a train that has the letters PERFECT as an integral part of the train cars.